FEATURE
One of the biggest issues is visibility. Many organisations lack a complete inventory of their machine identities particularly hybrid identities that are partially human-managed and partially automated. To avoid disrupting automated processes service accounts are often granted excessive permissions. If one such identity is compromised the resulting blast radius can be enormous.
Another challenge is credential hygiene. Machine identities rely on frequent rotation of secrets and certificates. Managing this manually becomes overwhelming when tens of thousands of machines require updates every few hours or days.
Security teams also face fragmented policy environments across AWS GCP on-premises
Quantum computing adds another layer of urgency as once mature it will be capable of breaking RSA and ECC undermining the cryptographic foundations of machine identities TLS certificates and API keys.
infrastructure and software-as-a-service platforms. Maintaining consistency often requires switching between multiple dashboards which increases operational risk.
The danger is not theoretical. A service provider may discover that 30 % of its machine identities are unmanaged and exposing critical APIs. Without unified automated governance maintaining control becomes impossible.
Deploying AI-driven solutions for machine identity management introduces its own risks. Over-reliance on automation means a single misconfigured policy can propagate instantly across thousands of services. Minor errors have already caused major outages due to automation amplifying mistakes at scale.
Omer Grossman, Chief Trust Officer, CyberArk www. intelligentcio. com
INTELLIGENT CIO APAC
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